2020.05.07.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Steve Jobs liked to take pictures. He was even taking a picture the last time I saw him. However, many people might not know that some of his photos shipped as Desktop Pictures in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

2020.03.03.

I always run into Mac utilities that are trying to patch a missing feature of macOS. Some of these are helpful tools but there are ones that are completely unnecessary since macOS provides a way to replicate them by default. The problem is that sometimes these features are hidden or require a bit of automation via Automator. I’m going to start a series here to share these tips, so you don’t have to clutter up your menubar (and waste system resources) for pointless utilities.

Toggle dark mode via keyboard

Open Automator and create a new Quick Action.

Set “Workflow receives” to “no input” in the top of the window. Also make sure it’s set to “any application”.

Search for “Change System Appearance” action on the left and drag it into the right side of the window. Automator now should look something like this.

Save it as “Toggle Dark Mode” or “Change System Appearance”.

Go to System Preferences/Keyboard/Shortcuts and choose Services on the left.

Find your newly created service in the list, then assign a keyboard shortcut to it.

You can now toggle dark mode via the keyboard shortcut you’ve picked in any app.

Show hidden files in Finder

You can just open any Finder window, press ⌘⇧. (Command+Shift+dot) to show or hide hidden files without installing anything special.

2020.02.26.

I was browsing Twitter yesterday and run into a group of people who disabled call receiving on their Mac because of macOS makes your Mac ring like any other mobile device by default. This can be great if your phone is in another room, but if you like me, your devices are nearby most of the time, so it’s really annoying when all of them are starting to ring at once when I receive a call.

Luckily there is a way to mute ringtones but keep the call notification around. This means your iPhone will ring, but other devices will stay silent and just show you the incoming call, giving you an option to answer them or hang up right there.

For some reason FaceTime notification settings are also controlling the appearance of phone calls on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, so you have to customize that.

macOS

Go to System Preferences/Notifications, find FaceTime in the list and turn off "Play sound for notifications". This way macOS will show all incoming FaceTime, FaceTime Audio, and regular phone calls in the top right, but your Mac gonna stay silent.

After acquiring the ringtone, go to Settings/Notifications, select FaceTime and set your new silent ringtone under Sounds.

watchOS

Open the Watch app on your phone, scroll down, select Phone and turn off Sound.

I like to keep Haptic turned on because sometimes I’m away from my iPhone but I still want to "feel" incoming calls on my wrist.

Setting up your devices this way gives you the best of both worlds: your devices – other than your iPhone – will stay silent when you receive an incoming phone or FaceTime call, but you’ll see the caller ID on the device you’re using. Also it will give you the option to answer the call without picking up your iPhone.

2020.02.05.

Although I still want to buy OmniGraffle sooner than later, which is also an excellent diagramming app on its own, having a dedicated app to create flowcharts is very appealing. I just found Diagrams for macOS, that just does that.

And the best, it’s a beautiful native Mac app, not the usual Electron crap.